Thailand Case Study

The
Thai Internet market is complex and dynamic. From a regulatory point of view,
archaic laws restrict the direct provision of telecom services by anyone other
than two government owned organizations. As a result, the 18 ISPs in Thailand
cannot have their own international or domestic infrastructure and must lease it
from others. One of the government-owned telecom organizations also has stakes
in all of the ISPs. Another unique aspect of the Thai Internet market is that
the majority of subscriptions are pre-paid.

Despite the
regulatory constraints, language barriers (complicated by the fact that Thai
does not use the western character set) and affordability issues (magnified by
the 1997 financial crisis which the country is still recovering from), the
Internet in Thailand is growing. International Internet bandwidth grew over 100
per cent in 2000. Figures for subscribers and users are notoriously variable due to
problems for accounting for pre-paid subscriptions. However, even the most
conservative estimates reckon that the market more than doubled to over two
million users at the end of 2000 (3.8 per cent of the population). Some claim the
figure is even higher at some 3.5 million users for 5.6 per cent of the
population.